Jenny Cooney is one of the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press that the others fight with all the time. She’s blocked me on Twitter because I’ve told the truth about her and her cabal within the HFPA for the last two decades.
Now Cooney has gone on Australian TV and defended the group against allegations of racism and not having any Black people among their 87 cronies.
Cooney had the audacity to say “the fact that there was not a Black member was not really anything we focused on because we were accepting and welcoming everybody from around the world that was based in L.A. that wrote for foreign publications, that was just our criteria.”
LOL. Please. This is too much. She continued: “The fact that there were no Black members we didn’t really consider a problem. Now of course we realize that we should have been much more proactive about really going out of our way to recruit and work with the media, the journalists, the foreign press, everywhere.
“We’ve always considered ourselves such a culturally diverse group,” Cooney said of the HFPA. “I think 35% of our members are non-European, from everywhere from North Africa, Philippines, Bangladesh, Japan.” She added, “I always thought diversity was more about not skin color but about nationalities and where people came from.”
Cooney also essentially lies about how the HFPA picks new members and that must be approved or vetted by the MPAA.
“The MPA did not have a Black member in their international directory at all, not to throw them under the bus, but, that was the pool we were choosing from,” she said, claiming that HFPA members have to be “vetted” by the MPA before joining. “And we’ve now realized we can’t rely on the studios, we can’t rely on anybody else.”
Well. she tried to throw them under the bus– and it’s just not true. There are plenty of Black members, for one thing, in the MPAA directory of journalists. But it doesn’t matter– the MPAA has NOTHING to do with HFPA or selecting members. And to wit, the Globes have just been involved in a lawsuit with a female journalist who wasn’t approved by them for no decent reason.
The HFPA is in serious trouble. The old guard– which Cooney and a few others represent — must be removed in order for them to move forward. Look at her in this video. She must go, along with her cronies.
It’s all coming apart, thanks mostly to very good reporting in the LA Times.
